When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  At the board meeting at Prange’s, Lombardi listened more than he spoke. Atkinson took out a pen and scrawled the positives on the back of a paper place mat, making the case for coming to Green Bay: (1) More money. (2) Autonomy. He could be both coach and general manager, and the board was promising to stay out of his way. No more Monday morning quarterbacking. (3) Talent. Jack Vainisi had stocked the team with skilled young players. (4) Recognition. The Packers had nowhere to go but up, and Lombardi would get credit for their rise. (5) Living conditions. It was far cheaper to live in northeastern Wisconsin than in metropolitan New York. They would make sure he had a nice house. His children would attend fine Catholic schools. He and his wife would be welcome members at the Oneida Golf and Riding Club. After a brief but powerful statement by Lombardi, the executive board members asked him to wait in an anteroom while they held a private discussion. Twenty minutes later they called him back and made a concrete offer. As Lombardi later recounted the bargaining, “They told me the job was mine and I told them the salary was not enough. I gave them another figure, which they met.” The two sides agreed on $36,000 per year for five years, handshakes all around. Lombardi had to take the proposal back to the Maras and Marie; Ole, Atkinson, Canadeo and Bourguignon had to present their choice to the full board of directors.

  As usual, once he had made a tentative decision that would take his life in a new direction, Lombardi faltered, his normal air of certitude suddenly vanished, and he became a contradictory mess, torn between impulsiveness and introspection, hardheaded self-interest and sentimentality. The Jesuits’“good judgment and training” seemed of little use to him on these occasions; he could see all sides of an argument but no right side. Before leaving Green Bay that day, he impulsively found a suitable house. But when he returned to New York and stopped by the Columbus Circle office to tell the Mara brothers about the agreement, he seemed to be hoping that they would prevent him from leaving. Instead, Well Mara declared that Green Bay was just the right place for him because as coach and general manager he “could be the law unto himself out there.” From New York, Lombardi drove down to Rumson, a town near his home in Fair Haven, and visited with one of his old friends, Jack Clark, a clothing store owner who loved football. Their families had been close since the days in Englewood. The Clarks were a loud and fun-loving clan, and it inevitably relaxed Lombardi to be around them. Once, when the Clarks held a “Pretty in Pink” baby shower at their house after having their first girl, DeDe, breaking a run of four boys, Lombardi rang the front doorbell dressed in a pink tutu, an incongruous vision that only the Clarks could inspire.

  Should he really go to Green Bay? Vin and Jack sat in the formal living room of the Clarks’ spacious new house and talked about it for hours, filling the ashtray with cigarettes. Clark was a Giants fan, but also Lombardi’s friend. When Lombardi left, he drove home and found Marie waiting in the kitchen with his little brother, Joe. In what Joe described as a “very casual” manner, Vince announced that he had decided to take the job in Green Bay—and that, by the way, he had found a new house for them out there. Marie was also torn by conflicted feelings. She had always been the one pushing Vin—to get a better job, to fulfill his potential, to attain the prestige and money she thought he deserved. But now that the move to Green Bay seemed certain, she was distraught. The next night she and Vin drove back to New York for a dinner of Fordham alumni at the Waldorf-Astoria. Marie saw Wellington Mara there and drew him aside while her husband was talking to some old football pals from the Blocks of Granite era. She begged the owner to uphold the Giants contract and stop Vin from leaving. “She wanted me to stop it. She begged me not to let him go to Green Bay,” Mara later recalled. “I could have stopped him. This was at a time when these contracts were sacrosanct. But I didn’t. I said, ‘Marie, I think Green Bay is the place for him.’ ”

  The board of directors of the Green Bay Packers, Incorporated, a contentious group of forty-five know-it-alls, convened the next day at noon at the Hotel Northland. Their function was to approve or deny the decision of the executive committee, or “Supreme Soviet,” as Milwaukee Journal sports columnist Oliver Kuechle derisively labeled the smaller but more powerful group. The full board met in the Italian Room, a name that caught the attention of one writer. There were seventeen reporters stuck in the makeshift press center, Room 173, lounging on the bed, in the chairs, sitting cross-legged on the floor, kneeling against the wall, resting on a turned-over wastebasket, coughing, cracking jokes and clouding the room with blue smoke as the hours dragged on with no word about a new coach. It was, one said, like waiting for the puffs of smoke that signaled the election of a new Pope in Rome. Inside the boardroom, every director had something to say about the future of the Packers. Why couldn’t we get Evy? some wanted to know. Did we try hard enough? Curly made this town, how can we turn away from him now? Why should we put so much trust in a guy from New York who’s never run anything in his life? But Ole and his allies had the votes, and when the directors had exhausted their complaints at last, the Packers hired a new coach and general manager. Ole came to the press room and, as the Press-Gazette reported, “read falteringly from a printed booklet which concerned the biography of a man named Lombardi.”

  Lombardi, by previous arrangement, was in New York awaiting the call at the Hotel Manhattan. Photographers from the wire services and New York newspapers came to his room to take shots of the new head coach as he talked by telephone with reporters in Green Bay. Yes, he had some ideas about who his assistants would be. No, he didn’t know much about the Packers since they were in the other conference. His first task would be to review game pictures. No, he never played pro ball. “At 180 and a guard I was a little light.” No, he was not looking back to New York. “I’m moving to Green Bay—lock, stock, and barrel.” Yes, he would take the Giants offense with him, and only wished that he could bring Frank Gifford along, too. No, he did not expect the Packers to be as bad as last season. “I have never been associated with a loser and I don’t expect to be now.” As Lombardi talked, the cameras clicked. One photo showed him smiling broadly as he held the white telephone up to his left ear, his nose crinkled, eyes squinting, a large gap appearing between his two front teeth. In another picture, taken after he had hung up, he was gazing into the mirror as he straightened his tie—two images of the same man, real and reflected, past and future, going and coming.

  The coming of Vince Lombardi to Green Bay completed a cycle of football mythology. Green Bay, where Curly Lambeau, founder of the Packers, taught football to Sleepy Jim Crowley, who became one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, made famous by Grantland Rice, and went to New York to coach at Fordham, where he mentored the Seven Blocks of Granite, among them Vince Lombardi, who ventured out to Green Bay to reclaim the glory that began with Curly Lambeau. Lombardi’s first impulse was to take another Block of Granite with him, but Tarzan Druze reluctantly turned down an offer to coach the ends; his coaching days at Notre Dame and Marquette were over and he planned to spend the rest of his life near the Jersey shore.

  There were no round-the-clock radio sports shows in Green Bay then; the news of Lombardi’s hiring spread through town that evening by word of mouth. Wayne Vander Patten, a local broadcaster, was sitting with his sports director, Bill Howard, at a basketball game at St. Norbert College when the word was announced. “Who the hell is Vince Lombardi?” he asked. Art Daley, the Press-Gazette sportswriter, went around town seeking reaction to the news. The most common response was, he reported, “Who’s that? . . . Mary over at the coffee house or Joe over at the garage aren’t quite sure who is this Mr. Vince Lombardi.” At the Gazette Building, John B. Torinus, the publisher and a member of the Packer board, was personally overseeing an editorial welcoming the new man, relying on facts from Lombardi’s résumé. “Over and beyond his coaching record is his scholastic record in college. He was a brilliant student.” The editorial repeated the old Lombardi embellishments that he was on the dean’s list at Fordham and had gra
duated cum laude, and concluded: “Everyone in Green Bay will wish him well, for we are all in this together.”

  At the breakfast shop the next morning, the men in Martha’s Coffee Club were gossiping about the big news in the morning paper. There was a guest story in the Press-Gazette from a “New York writer,” Joe King, who said the people of Green Bay “might mistake the new coach for a teacher of Romance languages who was about ready to earn his full professorship at an eminent college,” with his “kindly, almost benign smile, his self-effacing manners, the horn-rimmed specs.” But there was another side to him, King warned: “Lombardi is moody, Latinish, depressed, explosive from time to time.”

  This account made the Martha’s gang more curious and anxious about the new head coach. Funeral director, plumber, insurance man, office supply merchant, sheet metal salesman—all the fellows in the coffee club lived and died for the Packers. For ten long years they mostly had been dying. After Scooter McLean, they were ready for a major change, but the naming of Lombardi took them by surprise. Green Bay was a city of Catholics—French, Belgian, Irish, German and Polish—but the number of Italians then could almost be counted on two hands: Canadeo, Mazzoleni, Vainisi, the Bilotti brothers over at the Forum Supper Club. There were none in Martha’s Coffee Club. “It sounded as though we were getting a foreign-type person,” said John Ebert, the office supply store owner. “He was from New York. We wondered how he would do in Green Bay, Wisconsin. There was desperation for anyone to come and succeed, and all of a sudden here comes this guy Vince Lombardi.” The Green Bay Packers Alumni Association, less concerned about Lombardi’s eastern background, issued a formal statement expressing its confidence that “the Lombardi plan for resurgence will pay dividends; and that the thrill of good, sound and representative football will again be a part of the everyday life of the citizens of Green Bay and Wisconsin.”

  When Bart Starr, the young Packers quarterback, first heard the news, he barely recognized the name and knew nothing about Lombardi beyond the fact that he had been a Giants assistant. Then Starr saw the picture in the morning newspaper: the glasses and the determined eyes and the gap-toothed smile. Yes, he did know something about this man, one moment etched in his memory. It hit him “like a lightning bolt” who this Lombardi was. His mind flashed back to a preseason game at Fenway Park in Boston where the Packers played the Giants. Green Bay had just scored and Starr, after holding for the extra point, was jogging off the field. Both teams were on the same side of the gridiron in the center field area. As Starr ran past the Giants bench, he saw “this person yelling and screaming at the defense” of the Giants. When he saw Lombardi’s face in the paper, he realized—that was the same face! Here was the offensive coach screaming at the defense when they’re coming off the field after allowing the Packers to score. That was his immediate reflection. It “jumped right out” at him. And it brought a smile to Starr’s face. This Vince Lombardi, he thought to himself, is no Scooter McLean.

  12

  Packer Sweep

  THE LOMBARDIS drove to Green Bay as a family, but only the father and son showed the slightest desire to go.

  Marie could not suppress the tears when her husband steered their two-tone Chevy toward the turnpike to begin their long trek to Wisconsin. As she rode west on this dreary February day in 1959, she was separating from her family, friends, Fifth Avenue clothing stores, midtown restaurants, Monmouth racetrack, St. James Church, Atlantic Ocean, everything she had ever known. Her first impressions of Green Bay, which she had visited with Vince during a brief reconnaissance trip the previous week, had not made the leave-taking easier. She had told the local press then that Green Bay reminded her of Fair Haven, but in truth she found it to be a shudderingly alien place: sunshine glancing off blinding white snowdrifts when they had walked down the steps of the North Central Airlines plane onto the tarmac at Austin Straubel Airport, the temperature at zero, the landscape lunar and desolate, this little man known as Ole greeting them and escorting them in a car caravan along Ridge Road and Highland Avenue, past City Stadium and down to the neighborhoods of Allouez and De Pere, a trooper pulling them over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign! The people friendly, nosy, talking to her in singsong tones and slow rhythms as though they were reciting fairy tales to children.

  Was this the beginning or end? Winnebago Indian legend held that humans first came to earth just north of modern-day Green Bay, brought by thunder and lightning. But Alexis de Tocqueville, paddling into the wilds of nearby Duck Creek River during his 1831 tour of America, declared that he had reached the perilous edge of Western civilization and was ready to turn back. Marie Lombardi was of a similar mind during the trip west, and as she cried in the front seat, her twelve-year-old daughter sobbed behind her. Green Bay was beyond Susie’s imagination of the world. She remembered when her dad spread the map and tried to show the kids their new home, and he couldn’t find it himself at first. Vincent bristled at his sister’s sobbing and retaliated by battling over every inch of territory in the back seat. Not just Susie was back there, but also her favorite stuffed animal, a huge white bear. He would push the white bear down into the space below his sister’s feet and she would start to cry again and the Old Man would get that look in the rearview mirror and order him to “stop it, mister.”

  Vincent was almost seventeen, midway through his junior year in high school, ready for an adventure away from the demanding Red Bank nuns. Football was his life almost as much as his father’s, and he viewed Green Bay as an opportunity for both of them. His parents had already told him about the first question a reporter had asked at the airport earlier that month, a query that concerned not the new coach but his namesake kid. “Mr. Lombardi, what high school will your son enroll in?” the reporter had blurted out, and nervous laughter had filled the airport lounge because of the football subtext—what school would be lucky enough to get the bruising young fullback out of Red Bank Catholic?

  On the morning of their third day on the road, the Lombardis rounded Chicago and crossed Wisconsin’s southern border. As they approached Milwaukee, the scenery changed dramatically to white on white, and Vincent and Susan looked out in disbelief and despair at snowdrifts higher than car level lining both sides of the road. “The snow just blew your mind. It was right after a blizzard, and the roads were plowed, but the snow was piled up like I’d never seen it before,” Vincent later remembered. Susan said that she “had no idea snow got that big and tall. When we drove around Chicago everything was fine and we were up and talking and then it got real silent in the car when we saw this snow, and my father was trying to do everything to get everybody up again. We were going into a depression here. I’m thinking, Where’s he taking me? I don’t think I want to do this.”

  Green Bay was more a blur of white. Fresh snow was falling by the time they turned down West Mission Street in Allouez and spotted No. 222, the two-story Georgian house on the corner. It snowed the rest of that afternoon and into the evening. They were invited to dinner at Dick and Lois Bourguignon’s house two blocks away on Warren Court, and throughout the meal Vince and Marie and the children remarked on how unfailingly helpful and friendly the people of Green Bay had been. A man had already come down the street with a snowplow and cleared the drifts from the driveway and curb. A neighbor boy had shoveled the walk. The girl next door, Mary Jo Antil, had stopped by to see if Susan wanted to play. A clerk from the rail-road station had brought out Ricky, the family dachshund, who had avoided the three-day car trip, riding west in a cage on a train. The little wiener dog was nearly frozen from the winter haul and seemed discombobulated by his new environment, his feet so stiff that he kept tumbling down the stairs. This was a strange new world for all of them.

  On Monday morning the new life began. Susan went off to St. Matthew’s parochial school. Vincent had decided to attend Green Bay Premontre, an all-male Catholic high school, where his first day was unlike anything he had experienced back east. He felt like a celebrity or circus freak.
The papers had built him up as a New Jersey football wonder, a six-foot-two, 210-pound running machine—exaggerating his talent and his stature by about three inches and thirty pounds—even though his father had tried to present a more subdued assessment, telling the Green Bay press that his son was only “a fair to middling ballplayer.” At lunch, when Vincent walked into the school cafeteria, he sensed “a thousand heads turn and two thousand eyes” focus on him and he could hear the buzz. Marie walked next door and visited with Mary Antil, Mary Jo’s mother, and was fascinated by her antique silver collection. She decided that she would collect silver herself. Mary was equally fascinated by Marie, especially her voice, deep and smoky, not the stereotypical Jersey accent, with Jersey pronounced JOI-sey, but sharper, more like CHERH-zy.

  THE OFFICES of the Green Bay Packers had been redecorated while Lombardi drove to Wisconsin with his family. During an earlier visit he had examined the quarters—peeling walls, creaky floor, old leather chairs with holes in them, discarded newspapers and magazines piled on chairs and in the corner—and pronounced the setting unworthy of a National Football League club. “This is a disgrace!” he had remarked to his new secretary, Ruth McKloskey. Walls were torn down, others repainted, desks shifted, cubicles and counters constructed, new furniture brought in, all to give it a more professional appearance. For Lombardi’s own office, which he had appropriated from Verne Lewellen, he selected a wallpaper of tan burlap. McKloskey thought it looked strange and presented a health hazard, as she later remembered. “I almost died when they were putting it up because it was in great big rolls and lint was flying out all over the room. The men putting it up were groaning the whole time. When Mrs. Lombardi finally came in she said, ‘Who in the world thought of this?’ Mr. Lombardi was kind of sheepish about it. He thought it looked mannish.”